


Oil on Canvas

by Miss_Nearly



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Anxiety Attacks, Canon-Typical Blood and Gore, Gen, Gratuitous allusion to the Velvet Cailan, Light Angst, Not Beta Read, mention of dubcon, monarchs trying to outdo each other with art, racism against elves, with regards to a certain endgame spoiler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-13
Updated: 2017-09-13
Packaged: 2018-12-27 17:27:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12085827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Nearly/pseuds/Miss_Nearly
Summary: Queen Anora commissions a propagandist painting in honor of the Hero of Ferelden. Neria Surana looks at it and feels keenly all the ways she fails to measure up.





	Oil on Canvas

# Oil on Canvas

“Well, it’s pretty,” Neria managed.

“You’re underselling it, Warden-Commander,” Anora said, stirring her tea daintily in a delicate porcelain cup. “We commissioned the great master Jean-Pierre Perreault. It would hardly do to have anyone but the best honoring our hero.”

Not for the first time that week, or even this conversation, really, Neria idly wondered if Anora had some specific “we” in mind, or if the queen had chosen the royal “we” with the intent of unsettling her. It was a sound stratagem. Neria couldn’t help but remember that for all that she was the one who had crowned Anora, she had _crowned_ Anora. Hero of Ferelden or not, legally speaking, Neria was a subject addressing her queen.

A queen who, as she sipped her tea in a magnificent embroidered gown in the middle of her lavishly furnished private apartments, her hair coiled in magnificent blonde braids by servants she had dismissed upon Neria’s arrival, would be a far more suitable subject for the painting, Neria thought privately. 

Ostensibly, the painting depicted Neria at the Battle of Denerim, seconds away from slaying the Archdemon. Surveying the massive canvas—almost the size of the entire wall—again, Neria felt the same sense of unreality she had felt when Anora had unveiled it moments before. 

It was definitely…allegorical. The artist had created a battlefield of shadowed, swirling chaos. The bodies of countless soldiers and darkspawn lay strewn across the canvas, fading into one mass in the darkness of a starless night. The hulking figure of the Archdemon, rendered with angry strokes of bruised purple and rotting green and barely distinguishable from the sky in the backdrop, took up almost a quarter of the image as it bore down on a solitary figure that Neria supposed represented herself.

The painted figure stood almost as tall as Neria did in real life and was posed on a bare outcropping of rock. She held one arm outstretched, gripping a sword pointed, impractically enough, directly at the dragon’s heart. The other arm held upright a banner depicting Anora’s new coat of arms. Vibrant red hair (Neria’s actual color was far more muted than that) fanned out in a graceful cloud that obscured her pointed ears suspiciously well. The entire figure, from the shining sword through the impassive face to the golden armor (with its stylistic representation of the Grey Warden griffon splayed across the chest) radiated a warm light that battled the darkness around her. 

Neria stared at the painting and didn’t doubt at all that the semi-divine woman on the canvas would vanquish the beast and beat back the encroaching night without fear or danger to herself. 

Neria hated her.

It wasn’t that she looked human and beautiful and she inanely wore her hair loose in melee combat, though that was part of it. Neria was an elf and proud and her hair was short now. She had cut it unevenly with a dagger in a fit of stress and anxiety while her lover was in her borrowed bed sleeping with a woman he hated. Alistair had stumbled into his room afterwards, taken one look at Neria’s newly shorn head and the pile of red-gold locks she hadn’t meant to leave on the floor, and had broken down in tears. He had apologized profusely to her, as if it was his fault that Neria had practically coerced him into fathering a bastard child he didn’t want. They had fallen into each other’s arms, sobbing, and when they had run dry of tears, Alistair had taken her dagger and done his best to help her even out the haircut. Then they had fallen asleep in the same bed, without touching or saying another word. She had snuck out before the servants awoke, grateful for once that the nightmares that came with being a mage made her accustomed to long nights with little sleep.

She didn’t hate the figure for not showing any indication that she was a mage, either, though that certainly wasn’t far from her thoughts. Neria had abandoned her legally-mandated mage’s robes for plate armor and her hand-carved Circle staff for the ancient sword Spellweaver not long after the spirit in the forest had whispered the secrets of Arcane Warriors to her. Throwing herself into the pulsating center of a fight suited her far better than hanging back and trying not to catch a friend in the radius of one of her fireballs. She had once come within inches of killing Zevran that way and had subsequently become frustratingly conservative with dangerous magics. Even as they had approached a fallen Denerim, he had teased her about the incident—“Dying would not be pleasant, I admit, but wilting in the face of a beautiful, vengeful goddess’s wrath? It is almost worth it for the stories they would tell— ”

If she was completely honest with herself, the biggest reason Neria hated the woman in the painting was simply that she didn’t like she could be a real woman. There was nothing in her of Leliana, who, confronted with a charging ogre in the Marketing District, had dropped her bow and leapt forward with daggers in her hands, who hadn’t quite been able to avoid the arterial spray as she killed it, and who had emerged from the attack sticky and stinking with darkspawn blood. The woman held nothing of Morrigan, whose wolfish grin echoed those of the genlocks she was about to charge in the seconds before her bones crackled and swelled into a bearskarn’s frame. The woman bore no resemblance to Wynne, who grew wan and shaky as she did her best to preserve the lives of the dozen mages the Circle had been somehow able to scrape together and who, each time they lost one to the Archdemon’s fire (seven times), seemed to grow weaker and more pained. The woman didn’t even look like Anora, who days after having had her rule confirmed, in full knowledge that her home was about to be ravaged by the horde, had addressed the army the nervous elf beside her had cobbled together of browned ink and yellowed paper and who had reminded them that it was glorious to die for such a cause.

Most of all, that shining woman couldn’t possibly represent the elf who felt so keenly that she had sold her soul because she was terrified to lose her lover. She couldn’t possibly carry the weight of the deaths of the hundreds of soldiers who wouldn’t survive the battle. She couldn’t possibly know the harsh truth that they had only three chances to destroy the Archdemon, that if she and Alistair and Riordan fell, then all of Ferelden would fall. _Neria_ had felt it all, she had carried them all, and she had known too well.

Neria had stood at the top of Fort Drakon with her unevenly chopped hair and her patched and mismatched armor, spattered with gore and dirt, and had barraged the old god with her deadliest spells. She stood straight and tall even when a nasty wave of energy had overcome the shields of a mage beside her, and she had smelled and heard, rather than saw, one of her oldest friends die. She had hardly reacted when the Archedemon’s ungodly shriek summoned a final wave of darkspawn, despairing that her allies wouldn’t be able to hold them back, but knowing that they looked to her to put on a brave face. She had approached the beast as it fell, completely certain it would intercept her with its claws. She hadn’t believed that the sword she drove into its skull had actually killed it until the last of the darkspawn turned and ran. She had sunk to the ground in silent exhaustion. No one could convince her to move until Alistair appeared beside her and offered a hand. It was the first time they had touched since before the ritual. She was spent, dirty, and broken—nowhere near a vessel for holy light.

The woman in the painting was the fearless commander Neria had tried desperately to project, made divine, but Neria wasn’t that woman. She was a scared and scarred and guilty mage who had only just learned that she could raise her voice above a whisper without fearing a Templar’s sword. She was a small and jumpy and confused elf who had only just learned she could meet a noble’s haughty gaze without wilting into a mumbled “yes, ser”. Enshrining anything else seemed like a lie, so Neria hated it.

Behind her, Neria heard Anora clear her throat gently. She realized with a start that she had been glowering in silence for several minutes. She schooled her expression the best she could and faced Anora again.

“It really is an honor, my lady. I love it,” Neria lied at last.

Anora met her gaze with a wry smile and said, “No, you don’t. But everyone else will, and that’s the crucial detail.” The queen patted a spot next to her on her little bench, and Neria sat beside her cautiously. You’ll recall that Empress Celene commissioned a sculpture in your honor as soon as news of the Blight’s end broke?”

Neria nodded. She had attended the unveiling ceremony as a gesture of goodwill between Ferelden and Orlais. It was not an event she enjoyed recalling.

Anora went on: “The sculpture has been the most discussed item of the winter social season. It wouldn’t be proper for Celene to so outperform Ferelden in honoring Ferelden’s own hero, so this is our answer. We’ll unveil it officially at the start of the social season proper, once the palace is fully in working order. You’ll be present that evening, of course.”

“Of course, my lady” Neria agreed. She didn’t quite manage to keep a facetious edge from slipping into her voice. Anora caught her with an amused glance and had her revenge.

“It goes without saying that you’ll have to sit for a proper portrait in full Grey Warden regalia before you leave for Amaranthine. We’ll have it distributed throughout Ferelden so the common folk can venerate you properly. It will be something like Cailan did for his coronation but less—” here, even Anora stopped short, at an apparent loss for words.

“Velvet?” Neria offered with a sense of growing panic.

“I was going to say ‘horrid.’”

“Forgive me, my lady, but the entire concept of sitting for a portrait sounds horrid to me. I have so much to do before I leave—”

“You’ll simply have to bear the burden for the good of Ferelden,” said Anora archly. “After all, you’ve endured much worse in the past, and that was without a queen to order you to do it.”

“If you put it that way, I don’t suppose I have much choice.”

Anora laughed—a tinkling, feminine sound. “No, I don’t suppose you do.” She poured another cup of the tea she had been drinking all the while, and, every inch the classic hostess, presented it to Neria with a perfectly measured smile before going on. “That said, we’ll hardly need the publicity. The Perreault will already cause quite the scandal once we unveil it.”

“Why is that?” asked Neria, genuinely perplexed.

“Your pose,” said Anora, with all the patience of a senior enchanter addressing a particularly unruly group of apprentices, “is a clear reference to Fausti’s masterpiece, _Andraste Confronting Hessarian_. I expect at least three Grand Clerics to denounce Perreault as a blasphemer and the painting itself as irreligious. Perreault will most likely run off to Antiva with Arl Frederick’s third son, who thinks that no one knows he has no intention of going through with his arranged marriage to Lady Dulcibel. Celene will be hard-pressed to outdo that, especially with the portraits in the mix.”

Neria knew comparatively little about art, but by this point she could navigate politics fairly well. And she had read and destroyed those letters between Cailan and Celene, so she understood. “I guess I can survive being at the center of a religious controversy if I’m off in Amaranthine, if it’s for the good of the kingdom.”

“I have faith in you, Warden Commander.” Anora smiled again; this time it almost seemed genuine. “I’m afraid I have to cut our little visit short, though. One of my engineers is due to go over the plans for moving the painting downstairs without damaging it.”

“How are they going to fit in through the door?” Neria asked.

“They’re not. I think they plan to lower it from the balcony using ropes.”

“That sounds utterly thrilling.”

“Only compared to paperwork.”

“I can’t argue with that, my lady,” said Neria as she stood and placed the half-full teacup on Anora’s table.

She bowed carefully and managed to start for the door without actually turning her back to Anora. 

Almost through the door, she cast one last look at the painting and suppressed a shudder. Thank the Maker she’d be far away from that thing in Amaranthine. She was no one’s Andraste.

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this left melancholy behind and might have veered right into angst. Oops.
> 
> A wiser person than me said that finished is better than perfect. In that spirit I'm posting this flawed fic. There is a non-zero chance that I will one day return and make some much-needed edits, but in the meantime I hope someone can enjoy this little oneshot, which is the first story I've finished in ages.
> 
> Concrit is definitely welcome, since I'm still trying to whet my storyteller's knife.
> 
> Side note: I have a headcanon that archaic Ferelden sumptuary laws require mages to wear robes even when they are outside the Circle for legal reasons. As an Arcane Warrior, Neria has said "screw that" and has adopted heavier armor. She doesn't know it yet, but she has quite the rebel in her.


End file.
